Column A, Column B

I’ve been in Spain for 9 months.

Things I have missed:

• Family and friends
• A dryer (but only sometimes)
• Michigan beer
• Spicy food
• Customer service
• Central heating (but only for about two months)
• Fall & Spring foliage
• My gato

Things I haven’t missed:

• Driving
• Crappy weather
• Driving in crappy weather
• Expensive produce
• Expensive food & drink in general
• 2am cutoffs
• Coffee in to-go cups
• Sleep deprivation

Moonlit (in words, not pictures)

Today I’m drained, restless and dissatisfied for various, vague, and unreasonable reasons.

I am hanging onto 5am this morning:

waking up from some kind of dream, rolling over to look straight at the moon, hovering in a clear sky outside the open doors of my balcony.

I got out of bed, pushed feet into slippers, and stepped out to look down on the streets – maybe the first time I have seen them absolutely silent, in a town whose parties start midweek and last past daylight.

I’ve had a word hovering at the tip of my tongue lately: Aprovechar. To take advantage of; to make the most of.

For me that meant climbing back into bed, leaving the windows open, not thinking about other 5am mornings or the twirl of clocks at all.

81/365

Another cop out photo? No. (Yes. Maybe.)

More importantly, this was the means of finding out some very important news.

I had a phone interview with a school in Detroit today. Due to many technical difficulties I couldn’t take it via my internet number at home, and had to retreat to a locutorio with a shaky phone line and a woman screaming in the booth next to me. However, after several attempts to reconnect, I had a positive and encouraging interview with the administrative team, and went back home feeling hopeful. 15 minutes later I got a call from headquarters, offering me the job. (It’s the least amount of anxious waiting I’ve ever had to endure after an interview… and I am an expert at anxious waiting.)

This is a charter school system I’ve applied to and interviewed with before, and from what I’ve seen of their other schools and from my conversation with the administration, I think this may be the positive school environment I have been dreaming about. What’s more, they offer 50% tuition assistance so I can finish my masters… and the school is in the same part of Detroit where one of my best friends teaches Spanish.

I have faith (that I will understand someday)

For some reason this week I am less exhausted. Sometimes I wake up before my alarm. Take time to drink a cup of coffee, to sometimes (& accidentally) catch the bus on time, to meander into school early and wait outside the doorway of my first class – papers and flyswatters in hand – before the bell rings, instead of scrambling things together at the last minute.

Maybe there's just something about the sea air.

Somewhere below my feet (or below my skin) I can feel the slow almost perceptible shifts – things connecting. Getting It Together.

In school I am hearing a lot more Hellos and less Holas.

Nodding heads and ah, vale vale vale or even okay, of cooooouuuuurrrrse are replacing panicked blank faces.

We are drawing superheroes using comparatives and superlatives, who can throw hotdogs from his eyes or transform into a chocolate.

Occasionally my name is morphing from the familiar SAH-rah into a more deliberate SAWR-AH. (Not really phonetically closer to my native pronunciation, but paso a paso, eh?)

In classrooms and hallways students stop to ask me questions about the United States. (I haven’t had anyone ask me about England in weeks.)

Somewhere the 6th graders learned oh my god (I don’t think it was me) and like to use it with gusto.

(One learned asshole and used that with gusto, too – again, I swear it wasn’t me.)

And slowly we begin to move forward.

More than anything, I notice that when I am speaking to individuals or classes in English, students listen to me with trust instead of apprehension. Trust is big in language classes. I didn’t realize this at first, but it is. Trust and confidence are both far more integral to language production than boatloads of grammar. Similar to my first days in front of my American students years ago, during my first lessons here in Spain I was met with a sea of furrowed brows and many glassy stares. Even if I was repeating instructions that the teacher gave in Spanish or Valencian, these kiddos were totally at sea.

Write your name and the date at the top of the paper using pencil.

At first, despite wild gestures, brandishing utensils, and pointing to the date on the board, I imagine I sounded a lot like the adults in Charlie Brown. Bwah bwah BWAH bwah bwah BWAH bwah BWAH.

With some time, individual words began to emerge – thanks to some cognates, some basic vocabulary, and the fact that English is a stress-timed language. Bwah bwah NAME bwah bwah DATE (exaggerated indication of the date on the board) bwah bwah PAPER (waving around a paper) bwah bwah PENCIL (by now a few kids are on board and assist me in my wild pencil waving.)

Now, students watch me closely, perhaps trusting that somewhere in the sea of seasick vowel sounds there will be a life raft – a gesture, a cognate, or – even better – a word that now connects firmly to some image or idea in their heads.

Today in English a 4th grader made a joke.

Me: That looks like my cat. I have a black and white cat, with green eyes.
Kiddo: Pues, tu cat is old.
Me: Old? What?
Kiddo: Black and white photos? Old?

I am so proud.

So as the calendar Marches on (get it?) and with a date set for my return home (July 30th) I am hanging onto hope, and reigning in my building anxiety about returning home. I am going to trust that clarity will arrive when I need it.

Mid-Year

I feel like most things in my life recently are a little retrasado (and I mean that more in the running late sense, and less in the mentally delayed way – but who knows?)

So more than a week after the fact, I am taking time to comment upon the many impressions and inspirations that I was left with after spending several days in Valladolid for Fulbright´s mid-year meeting. This included all the English Teaching Assistants from all over Iberian Peninsula – from Valencia, Cantabria, Madrid, and Andorra – and all the research grantees here in Spain, researching everything from cancer to Antarctica to flamenco.

Hint: this is not a cheap student hostel.

Glimpses & Glimmers

So for the past month I’ve been posting pictures instead of words.

(Spain got your tongue?)

I have been living here for five months. I have put down some roots, tied down my edges, and other roots have curled their way out of the ground to link me here before I realize it.

I recognize people on the street.
The greek waiter knows how I like my coffee, accompanying it with increasingly larger bits of pastry.
I often wake up speaking Spanish in my head.
The number of people who think I am Spanish increases, which I take as a compliment.
When people ask me for directions, I can answer.
My native tongue is disintegrating. In English I speak almost exclusively in Spanish cognates, even to native speakers.

I am accustomed to the dry earth and the waxy leaves the size of my hands, littering slick stone outside my door.
I am accustomed to the clatter of shutters opening in the morning, and to the real bells,
and to the light scattered from bedsheets billowing in sunshine.
I am addicted to tangerines – skin picked off in ragged spirals, citrus glow lighting up between my teeth.

The dramatic shifts and contrasts sometimes fray my connections with time or place or relevance.
Yesterday while walking down a street I had never seen before, I cried about something that happened years and years ago.
(Suddens storms coming in unexpectedly across the sea.)

I’m getting accustomed to beauty – and not just the little pieces of it I have collected for years.
(Sunrise over concrete expanses of highway, clean lines of scissors,
or the bottomless wells of beauty in my students’ eyes.)
Here I am drowning in new textures and scents and colors.

I’m worried I’ll lose track of the beauty in 6am highways or streets shuttered up in plywood, and of other abilities as well:

the ability to work endless days on a few hours of sleep,
the ability to write or even speak legibly in any language,
the ability to live inland,
the ability to shake hands,
the ability to drive a car,
the ability to wear a warm coat,
the ability to tip, to kiss, to dress business casual,
the ability to connect with people who have known me for more than five months.

This year isn’t easy, but I know better.
I know that I will look back at this year through golden light,
candles flickering, the scent of oranges,
far from some midwestern winter.

So for now words fail me and my voice creaks itself silent.
Lick lips, stuck shut.
Lacking stories (or rather, the tongue to tell them) I only have glimpses.

Esperanza y Belleza (and maybe some sleep deprivation)

This morning I said goodbye to my dear amiga who came to visit me for nearly a week – a week of exploring Madrid, of showing her around Alicante, of watching her learn (and use) her first words of Spanish, of getting bed bugs in Madrid and spending a fair amount of our trip getting rid of them, a week of delayed flights and hours spent in airports, a week of meeting new people and introducing an old friend to what has become normal life to me. (Except the bed bug part, thank god.)

It was a very full week and it flew by, only slowing down for brief moments: the frigid walk through the empty streets of Madrid on Christmas Eve with a Russian pilot I met while waiting for the cathedral to open. The grey jumbled expanse of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia museum. The sound of the sea sifting through stones on the coast of Altea. The brown patchwork of Spain drifting by beneath me – roads winding through hills to small towns clustered around bullrings and church spires casting humble shadows.

Now time has slowed down again and I am wandering Madrid on my own for the day until my paths cross with other friends tonight. After so much conversation and adventure it is a headlong tumble into my own brain-noise. Listening to guitar players and stepping over puke on the metro. Watching as the street workers clean up the massive heaps of garbage from Madrid’s New Year’s Eve’s Eve (which appeared to be a full dress rehearsal for the fiestas to come tonight, Nochevieja.) Getting the first hola guapa of the day from a gentleman with pajama pants and a mimosa in hand, behind glass in a hotel lobby. Wandering in and out of churches and plazas and bookshops, looking for central heat or for sunlight. Finally indulging my craving for spicy food at an Indian restaurant in La Latina, where chicken vindaloo and a free shot of apple liquor leave me warm inside despite numb fingertips.

For me the beginnings and endings of things are significant – a year older, a year ending. I feel contemplative this time of year, and  especially now: beginning a new year in a new place, so far away from where I was a year ago and with no idea where the next year will find me. I wish I had something more conclusive or wise or insightful to say, instead of just a handful of vivid snapshots, trailing loose ends and snipped connections like so many sparking wires.

Rather than resolutions (though I have them) or summaries (it would be impossible) or predictions (even more so) I want to close this year with hope.

Hope that 2012 holds more healing than hurt, more growth than destruction, more peace than war.

Hope that this coming year will find me stronger, more aware, more open, more adaptable, more rooted in confidence and peace.

Hope for the same for the ones I love (yes, you.)

Turning the sea upside down at el Castillo de Santa Barbara – photo by Ashes.

Christmas, Catharsis, and the Anti-Whine

I am here in Madrid by myself for the night, and tomorrow morning I will go back to the airport to meet a dear friend who is coming to visit me (and Spain, for the first time!) I arrived earlier today, and now I am in the cocoon of light and warmth and wifi that is the the bar of my hostel. It is Nochebuena - Christmas Eve in Spain. This is when Spaniards get together with their families to eat a gigantic meal of American Thanksgiving proportions, and later go to la misa del gallo - the rooster´s mass, at Christmas eve (because the rooster was traditionally the first to announce the birth of Christ.) The streets are not as busy as they usually would be at this hour, with most stores and restaurants shuttered up. People on the street are dressed up (with the occasional Santa hat or reindeer antlers) and hurrying to various festive destinations – carrying covered dishes or gifts or children. A few foreigners wander aimlessly, perhaps baffled by the way the bustling Spanish streets can empty themselves up so quickly and completely: shutters pulled down over storefronts, the slamming shut of old doors. My basic Spain Survival Skills have given me enough foresight to find a panadaría and frutería for some rations for later when everyone has retreated to their family meals, and I found a small empty cafe to satiate my ever growing addiction to café con leche. 

It is an easy time to feel orphaned and melancholy (alone! expat! homesick! Christmas!) but I am determined to make it more than that.

Living in a new country always teaches you even more about yourself than about the new culture. And a few months in, the things that have surfaced have not all been very pretty. I have found that especially in new and stressful situations, it is far too easy to let myself feel victimized. After the initial glow fades, you are beaten down by a country whose customs you don’t understand, full of people who don’t understand you. Daily tasks are baffling. Simple objectives become nearly impossible. Small talk during lunch break is terrifyingly trilingual.

Overwhelmed people shut down, or hide, or avoid… or whine. Slog through doggedly and sullenly. This is what I have been doing a bit too much lately. On a conscious level, I want to live outside my comfort zone. I want to be challenged because I want to grow. But not if I can’t whine about it. Not if I don’t get to maintain a steady stream of angst.

Is Catholicism is to blame? (Blaming Catholicism For Things has been another fun hobby, but isn’t always fair.) A steady diet of martyrs in halos and sacrificial lambs raises selfless folk whose sacrifices are repaid by gold halos and eyes cast heavenwards. Longsuffering. I think a lot of people* get lost in the sacrifice part and lose the thread of what really matters – what is worth the sacrifice, worth stepping out of the lines.

(*Obviously, I am just referring to myself)

I have always been one to push forward to new horizons – but then I get bogged down in anxiety, making me whiny and sullen and reclusive. I think this year will be a crash course in Being Joyful and Living In The Moment and Being Happy Alone - because often my alone times traveling are my favorite times. (I relate to Anna here and to the article she mentioned here.) Then the moment comes and it’s Christmas and I feel lonely, but I’m shaking it off. I don’t want to squander the joyfulness of adventure; I don’t want to lose the lightness of walking alone down an unfamiliar street in a beautiful city. I will see loved ones tomorrow (in person and via Skype) but for now I am listening to Villancicos (you can too, here!) and eating a mandarina and soon I am going to wander off to find out what Christmas in Madrid looks and smells and tastes like.

Felíz Navidad a todos. / Molt Bon Nadal a tots. 

(In case you wanted to know what a Mediterranean Christmas Eve looks like.)

(Sneak preview for family back home; due to mailing delays – mostly my fault – these presents will hopefully be brought by Los Reyes in early January… in true Spanish style.)

Oceans Away

Oh boy! Another long pause followed by another long post!

Two months of living in Spain, and I am beginning to find my stride. I have several students for clases particulares (private classes), several intercambios (language exchanges), and have just signed up for a yoga class offered by the community center next to my school. I’ve made a few American friends and a few Spanish friends, so that I have some relationships to neglect now that my schedule is getting busier. I’ve had the opportunity to go on two field trips with various classes: one to a nearby park where the 2nd graders learned about traffic laws (including the chance to practice on a bike course complete with signs and traffic lights), and another to Jijona to visit a turrón factory and some caves up in the mountains.

On the bus with the entire Secundo Ciclo (3rd & 4th grade)

We could see Alicante from the mountain! (The kids were curious... ¿Dónde está tu casa en Michigan?)

Las cuevas...

Field trip finish early? Don't want to go back to school yet? Let your students run around in the park for approximately three hours!

In between, during the normal school day, I think I am finding my place here. (The next step? Learning to be content with that place.) I have four English classes a week with the teacher, with the fifth and sixth graders, and the rest of my sixteen weekly hours are in plásticas (art) classes. The English classes are wonderful – I feel like I am learning a lot about teaching ESL, and even though I only have one hour a week with each class, I can see progress. This week I am starting my Fulbright side project – a pen pal exchange with elementary classrooms in the United States. I’m excited about this project – the Fulbright side projects are meant to be aligned with Fulbright’s goals of intercultural exchange, in a way that is challenging and educational for both the auxiliar (me) and the students, and I think this will be all of those things.

I feel less excited about the plásticas classes. With the older grades, I sometimes am able to plan my own activities that combine art with language – or at least I am given ten or fifteen minutes to teach some vocabulary related to what they are working on. The teachers let me do Halloween activities with the kids, and most have agreed to let me bring in other holiday activities and lessons. The rest of the time I am circulating around the room trying to find things to say in English. Particularly with the first and second graders, whose plásticas activities are primarily coloring, cutting, and occasionally gluing, I am finding it hard to impart more language than “Oh, great job! That looks good! I like his red hat! What a nice blue house! Do you know where your scissors are?” They’re experts at colors, because it’s difficult to talk about much else, when I don’t have time for songs, activities, or more direct lessons… so often when I say anything to them in English, they just start holding up their crayons and saying proudly: “Green! Yellow! Rrrrred!” I think they see me as a weekly visitor whose sole purpose is to check that they know their colors in English. (It’s understandable. That’s a pretty fair assessment of the role I am currently given.)

After spending three years teaching in Detroit, building a language program from scratch, and preparing six or seven lessons a day at different grade levels, and letting my teaching job devour nearly all my free time, it feels foreign and increasingly frustrating to spend so much time hovering around at the back of classrooms. You would think that being this useless would be less tiring – but between the extra strain of speaking two (or three!) languages and the long days, I am just as exhausted by the time I go home.

It might sound like I am whining, but I’m not. (At least, I shouldn’t be.) It is easy to whine. It is easy to compare the current situation to others and to some imaginary ideal in your head, where you have boundless time, materials, support, and the rapt attention of (no more than a reasonable number of) bright, clean little faces. Teaching is never going to occur in an ideal situation, because it is a job working with the most young and chaotic members of our already-unpredictable human race. Especially as a teacher in ESL and/or foreign languages – which are not on the big standardized tests and often less funded or organized – I can expect a career full of unreasonable expectations, meager resources, and creative solutions.

So here I am – teaching English, learning more Spanish, and most importantly, trying to foster intercultural exchange. I think the only thing more eye-opening than teaching itself is teaching in a foreign country. There are so many confusing, revealing, and thought-provoking reminders that I am oceans away from my comfort zone.

Por ejemplo…

• The loud THWACK of a plastic folder on the head of an overly talkative student, when an irritated teacher smacked him with it hard enough to send a bit of plastic flying across the room. Back home this event might have been followed by a lawsuit – here it was followed by a collective gasp, a brief tirade in Valencian, and restored order in the classroom.
• The birthday celebration for some teachers during el recreo last week, where the teacher’s lounge erupted into activity: snacks materializing from somewhere, a few liters of beer circulating in little plastic cups, regional pastries unfolding themselves from paper cartons brought from someone’s pueblo, congratulatory dos besos for the birthday folk, and a loud jumble of laughter/Valencian/Castellano/Spanglish. I sipped beer self-consciously (with the noise of the students on the playground outside) while the primary school teachers tried to refill my cup whenever they noticed it was empty.
• The very, very young students in the building – although I don’t work with infantil, it is bizarre to see the tiny three year olds in the hallways, in their little gingham smocks called babis, hanging onto each other to create very slow-moving and haphazard trains, or occasionally carried by their teachers (also dressed in babis, which is pretty genius if you are going to be hugged by so many grubby little people.)
• A distinctly European level of comfort with the human body, with anatomically correct posters to teach all the bits and pieces, a detailed discussion of childbirth in the kindergarten class, a student changing into his karate uniform in the fourth grade hallway, the discussion about the Birth of Venus (and a student’s commentary: We have that picture in my house – but my dad cut out the face and replaced it with a picture of my mom…) Let’s not even talk about the fair where I stumbled upon a father helping his small son pee on a wall at the side of a crowded street…
• A general lack of anxiety that has been hard for me to assimilate, as approximately a hundred 3rd and 4th graders ran amok on a field trip – wrestling, piling on top of each other, hanging off railings over a very scenic and very high cliff. The other teachers must have noticed the panicky look in my eyes, because they just shrugged and said - “eh… es normal para los niños.” There isn’t the paranoia that I am used to in lawsuit-happy America – the paranoia that manifests itself in safety railings, warning signs, first aid kits, fire escapes. Then again, maybe there is something to be said for a lack of paranoia. I haven’t noticed an inordinate amount of children falling off of castles or down into caves.
• Further nonchalance in the area of sanitation. I am used to certain things in American schools – the vats of hand sanitizer, availability of tissues, and reminders to cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze – that simply are not here. (Terrifyingly enough.)

Niños in high places.

Note the welding that is going on while we are below in the caves. Not only is this very loud during the tour, but there is also a lot of sparks and a half-constructed railing as we all file past on the wet steps...

On the other hand, there are some things that have been comfortingly consistant from one continent to another:

• Students are excited to see me anywhere outside of the classroom: at the store, on the bus, in the city center, in a nearby pueblo at a fair… just like my students in the United States, they are fascinated to discover that teachers do things outside of the school.
• Being a teacher is a like being a rockstar. People are always screaming your name in the hallway or in the street.
• In drawings, if there are people dancing there will always, always be a disco ball present.
• Tattling and whining are both phenomena that easily cross the language barrier.
• First graders will always be a little bit insane.
• No matter how strictly or tightly controlled the lines are, the creativity of children will always, always spill through the cracks in some way.

(I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.)

Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns

We talked about the difference between scary and fun when it comes to Halloween. Most people chose scary. The sweet little third graders were particularly bloodthirsty.

The things I’d do to crunch leaves beneath my feet

(Notes from a journey)

I am relearning how to be a passenger -
how to travel alone on slick rails or the lumbering rumble of this near-empty bus,
pointed toward Madrid.

The clouds began to gather over the Mediterranean, light pushing us inland.
We pass places I will never see up close.
An old man pokes around with a cane under an olive tree.
Broken walls drown in the brush, or circle fortresses perched on cliffs,
edges smoothed by clouds.

Slowly twirling wind turbines march in lines over the hills.
Their smooth graceful lines make me taste imagined vertigo of a dream I had once:
clutching windmills,
or perhaps it was a book I read, or some carnival ride,
hanging on and trying not to vomit.

I will watch from an unheroic distance.
My coffee trembles in its
fragile paper cup.

I am relearning the art of contentment.
I am undoing the strings that slowly tug at my ribcage.
Being un-lonely when I am alone.
Un-craving solitude in crowded rooms.
Un-missing. Un-yearning.